Enterprises are facing ever-increasing demands. Therefore, they’re looking for ways to scale their infrastructures. But there’s a problem. Scaling traditional on-premises infrastructure can be expensive. You have to cover hardware costs, conduct software updates, and train staff. The costs can add up.
Cloud computing has changed the game. It gives enterprises the ability to scale infrastructure up or down depending on their current needs. It’s also cost-effective and secure. It’s a no brainer for organizations to move to the cloud rather than try to scale their on-premises servers.
Even then, migrating to the cloud is no walk in the park. Things can go wrong. It can be a painful process if executed without proper planning, testing, and execution. The migration experience for many enterprises is often torrid and is one of the most common cloud-related pain points.
So, What is Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration involves the moving of applications, data, and other business elements from an on-premises data center to the cloud. The cloud offers enterprises storage, compute, and networking resources at scale.
If your organization has an on-premises IT deployment, you want to grow without bottlenecks caused by outdated and underutilized resources. The modern-day business landscape calls for businesses to be flexible and agile. They need to adapt fast to changing market demands.
Making Cloud Migration Easier
Organizations often find themselves in a bind when migrating applications to the cloud. They have to make tough decisions on the organization’s requirements, architecture principals, and evaluation criteria. The following Gartner Cloud Migration strategies can help make the process more manageable.
Rehost
The Gartner cloud migration recommendations suggest that organizations redeploy their applications to a new hardware environment. They should, then, change the infrastructure configuration of the applications. This is what Gartner refers to as rehosting. It makes the migration of applications to the cloud much faster, especially when they’re no changes to the applications’ infrastructures.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offers a key advantage since teams can migrate systems quickly without making modifications to the architecture. This capability has the potential of becoming a disadvantage because of the loss of scalability from the infrastructure’s cloud characteristics.
Refactor
This refers to the deployment of applications on a cloud provider’s infrastructure. According to Gartner, the main need for cloud application migration is PaaS (Platform as a Service), which is backward compatible. It’s the perfect combination of familiarity with innovation – devs get to reuse investments in frameworks, languages, and containers. This allows them to leverage the strategic code of the organization.
Unfortunately, refactoring is not all a bed of roses. The drawbacks include transitive risk, framework lock-in, and missing capabilities. Since the PaaS market is still in its budding stages, devs could miss some capabilities that are present in the existing platforms.
Revise
One of the key cloud migration strategies, according to Gartner cloud migration recommendations, is supporting legacy system modernization. Organizations do this by extending or modifying the current codebase. They should follow this up by refactoring or reusing options for deployment to the cloud.
Doing this helps optimize applications and bring them to the same level as the cloud infrastructure characteristics of the provider. The disadvantage is it’s expensive to start a development project. Based on its extent, revision can take a long time to deliver effective cloud application capabilities.
Rebuild
This is yet another cloud application migration strategy from Gartner. It calls for the rebuilding of the solution on PaaS, removing existing code, and re-architecting the application. As is the case with other strategies, rebuilding has its pros and cons. On the one hand, you’ll need to use new code and frameworks. On the other hand, it opens up new and innovative features to the consumer through the cloud providers platform. This can help improve developer productivity since they have access to tools that allow them to do more with less.
The key drawback with rebuilding is the vendor lock-in. A drastic increase in price, technical change, or service level agreement breach, means the organization has to restart with a new provider. There’s a possibility the enterprise could lose all or some of its application assets.
Replace
Replacing is the final cloud migration strategy proposed by Gartner. This means substituting an existing application with existing commercial software that comes as a service. Doing this eliminates the cost of mobilizing a development team whenever the needs of the business change. Replacing has challenges as well. They include inconsistent data semantics, vendor lock-in, and data access restrictions.
Migrating to the cloud has its benefits, but it’s not without challenges. It’s, therefore, not an easy decision to make. It affects many other components in the organization. The decision to move to the cloud should come from the need for infrastructure or application modernization.
Consider infrastructure portfolio management and application portfolio management programs while considering cloud application migration. The key to any cloud migration decision is optimization.